


Glory of the Sun

by feralphoenix



Category: Yggdra Union
Genre: M/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2012-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:12:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/561920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Sometimes things have to hurt. Sometimes things are worth it.</i> Gulcasa and the most important question he has to ask.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glory of the Sun

**Author's Note:**

> _(almost gold, almost amber, almost light_ – if the two of us had never met, I would not be able to smile like this)

0.

You spend your morning cutting the pads of your fingers open on thorns.

The first time it happened, you bit back the oath and frowned and knew that it would be too much hassle to take the roses apart and thread them together again, because then you would just be back where you started. It would be less time-consuming to just cut off the innermost thorns once you finished, and you are kind of on a time limit, so: You decided to forge ahead.

It’s fitting, though. You’re almost mad that you didn’t consider doing this on purpose.

You spend your morning cutting the pads of your fingers open on thorns, and it hurts, but you don’t really mind. Sometimes things have to hurt. Sometimes things are worth it.

I.

Once, on a patrol with your men strewn through wheat fields, you and he came across a little chapel barely the size of an outhouse, crumbling with age. By chance, you were looking to the side when Nessiah wrinkled his nose.

“Are you an atheist?” you asked him, later.

He wrinkled his nose again, the exact same movement. It was the daintiest expression of disdain you ever saw, clear even under the bridge of his mask. “I don’t believe that’s quite the correct term,” he replied to you, “because atheism implies disbelief and not just lack of practice. If I’m anything, it’s closer to antitheism.”

“So you hate religion?”

“It’s not religion that I hate,” he said. There was a certain tightness at his lips that told you not to ask, and so you didn’t.

Months later, the first night that he pulled your shirt off with a strength that you would never have expected of his slender hands, you remembered that conversation and worried a little when his fingertips traced down to the sign of the six-pointed star you had been wearing as a pendant underneath your clothes.

He lifted it off your chest, ran his fingertips across the little points over and over, and his expression did not change.

But instead of pushing the star away, or pulling the pendant until the chain snapped, he released it, skimmed his palms over your chest. He pulled you down into a kiss, and the motion was fierce but his lips were soft.

II.

“I fucking can’t,” you said, and put your head down.

“You can,” Nessiah told you, and there wasn’t even any impatience in his words. Not an ounce of irritation. There was a note his voice had to it when he was suppressing annoyance, you’d heard him talk to Jenon enough times to notice it, but right then you didn’t hear it. “Try it again, because I assure you that you are quite capable.”

When you looked back up, he was folding his hands together slowly, interlocking his fingers two at a time. One corner of his lips was a little higher than the other.

“And though I wouldn’t recommend cursing before the nobility—many among them might dismiss it as a sign of bad breeding or ill discipline—the next time I hear the word _fucking_ out of you, I’d like you to enunciate the G with a bit more strength.”

He dimpled, just a little, in one cheek when he was trying not to smile. You loved that too much to be mad at him.

“Fuck- _innnngk,”_ you said in a deliberately flat and nasal tone. Nessiah laughed at that, quick and bright and surprised, and covered his smile with his fingertips.

III.

“Cooking is easy,” you say.

“Cooking well,” he says, “is a nigh-impossible balancing act of regiment and intuition and willful risk-taking. If you fail, you must still clean up and then procure materials for another go or give up, and find sustenance elsewhere or go without. It is difficult and has the potential to be stressful.”

“Experimenting with cooking is fun,” you say, and reach for an egg. It is difficult with Nessiah crowding you at your shoulder. “You can learn things and you can play around. And it’s not that easy to mess things up to the point they’re inedible levels of bad.”

“You and I have different definitions for the word _inedible,”_ Nessiah says. “Experimenting with cooking makes no sense.”

“It makes lots of sense,” you say. You crack the egg and pry the shell apart, pouring white and yolk into the mixing bowl. “Oregano and basil taste good with savory things and meat, you can tell from their smell and the way they taste fresh. You wouldn’t want to put too much of a sweet spice into something that you like salty.”

“You put pineapple in curry,” Nessiah says. “You put salt in sweets.”

“It balances the taste,” you say, “it’s easy to understand.”

“It’s completely illogical.”

“You’re fussy,” you point out to him.

“You’re an idiot,” he says, mild and matter-of-fact.

You peel the banana and cut half of it into thick coins, then hand the rest of it to Nessiah. He leans against you back-to-back while he eats it, and you stir the pancake batter. His spine is bony and it presses into you, and you think you could probably count his vertebrae exactly, and you think you could spend every morning like this for the rest of your life and not get tired of it.

IV.

The thing about Nessiah is that he is tiny. He weighs nothing. He has bones like a bird and he’s as fragile as hollowed glass, and his hands are small.

This doesn’t mean that he isn’t strong, because mass has got fuck all to do with power. Glass can cut, and a knife with a thin blade will make the deepest wounds, and Nessiah can make weapons out of magic and corpses and words. Plenty of people have mistaken Nessiah for defenseless because he is little, and the majority of them haven’t lived to tell about it.

But there was a morning when he woke with a sharp cry and folded into himself and shivered, and you remembered, _oh, he is small._

And there was a night when you couldn’t walk for sickness and couldn’t see for tears and when you were on your knees he put his thin arms around you, and you realized, _oh, he is soft._

V.

At night, he holds you so tightly that his nails leave crescent marks in your skin. He cards his fingertips through your hair, sometimes, but doesn’t make fists on it, has never tried to pull it. You’ve never had to warn him not to pull it.

If he’s nervous, or if he’s feeling too much pain, you can tell from the press of his lips, like he’s biting them, so you slow down and ask him what he’d like you to do, what would be better. He’ll soften out, just like that, put his arms around you and smile into your shoulder, maybe whisper to you so that you know.

When he’s on the edge you can feel the tension all through his body, his back curving inwards, bringing him closer to you.

You like best the way that he glides when he comes, how his limbs will go loose, and he stops being too self-conscious to raise his voice. You like holding him after, the way your heat lingers in each other.

He says your name sometimes, not like he needs something, but like he wants to be sure you’re really there. You curl up around him because you know the feeling.

VI.

There’s an old story about a pair of lovers from different sides of a war.

The way the story goes is that no one lets them forget it.

The way the story ends is that they kill themselves, and the way the story is understood is that the war pushed them into it, that the war defined them and that it killed them.

Nessiah falls down onto his backside with his legs bent at awkward angles and he just stares up at you. It’s the kind of expression that’d be called gaping, in a lesser creature. You imagine that underneath his mask, his empty eyes are open wide, raw red sockets trailing off into the blackness of his skull.

“I always thought you were dangerous, but,” he says, and the words are breathless and he doesn’t finish his sentence.

“Not as dangerous as you,” you say back to him. Nessiah shuts his mouth. The shadows along his throat shift as he swallows.

You lean forward, hold out your hand and brace your other hand against the flat of your thigh. There are roaring voices in the backdrop but around the two of you it is quiet. Nessiah watches your hand, watches your face, and when you still don’t pull back he reaches out almost timidly to clasp your armored fingers in his.

You pull him up with you, don’t let go of his hand until he’s steady on his feet.

You tug him closer to you, softly, without any force so that he doesn’t have to come if he doesn’t want to. He allows himself to be pulled, until he’s pressed up against the armor covering your chest and both your arms are folded around him.

“I missed you,” you say. His shoulder blades are a ruined, mealy mess where the bones and sinews of his wings were carved away. Your blood is lava in your veins and your fever will never really go down. You hug Nessiah until he squeaks. “I love you.”

You have always hated that old story.

VII.

Part of what you fought for was a promise you made to the first person who ever let you feel safe, and part of what made you unable to give up was a memory of bruises and too-large hands all over your body.

But another reason is that when you look at Nessiah, the need wells up to make a world where he doesn’t have to be afraid.

You tell other people that your downfall wasn’t until he saved you from drowning in your own despair, but the truth is that you were done for from the moment you first saw him smiling not entirely kindly, beneath twilight filtering through a heavy canopy of leaves.

You thought then that your heart might explode, it was beating so violently.

That feeling is a part of you now, like your hair that you will never ever cut, like the heat of your blood, and you can’t imagine yourself without it.

0.

Nessiah’s sitting on a bench in the garden, reading a book. There’s a subtle smile about his lips and the light breeze keeps lifting the very hem of his skirts, baring the white length of his legs.

Your pulse is going nuts; you feel heady like you’re on a sugar rush. Your footfalls make noise in the grass, but you clear your throat just in case. Nessiah looks up as you stop in front of him.

You reach your hands out, set the flower crown on his head with bandaged fingers. Nessiah stares up at you. His smile’s gone, but there’s curiosity there; he doesn’t understand, you’re pretty sure, and he’s waiting for an explanation.

So you take a breath. Hesitate. Inhale again, and:

“Will you marry me?”

Your face feels hot and you almost think your voice creaks on the me, and you feel like an idiot, but in front of you Nessiah’s white cheeks are coming up brilliantly red.

He’s smiling, just a little, and it’s nothing like any smile you’ve ever seen him wear. It’s a shy smile, quiet.

When he makes as if to speak, you hold your breath and wait for his answer.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration comes from [this illustration](http://kirbypj.blog86.fc2.com/blog-entry-8.html), which was done for me by Umitsu, who is wonderful.


End file.
